Tricky Double Bill: Naked and Famous & in Concert 12A

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Something of a cult classic, and Bristol-based documentary filmmaker Mark Kidel’s first of many adventures with a small digital camera, 1997 doc Naked and Famous sees Tricky telling the story of his life so far: the saga of a mixed-race asthmatic kid from Knowle West. Focusing mainly on a visit to the school and streets of his youth, the film explores the roots of the dark torment which provided the stuff of Tricky’s brilliant early albums, especially Maxinquaye.

Fascinated by violence and thrust into a gender no-man’s land by anti-asthma drugs, Tricky presents himself as a self-confessed ‘mutant’, from a family of ‘mongrels’. Kidel’s film gets under the skin of its subject and provides a powerful account of Tricky’s troubled inner world - plus, of course, there’s breathtaking music - which you can hear more of in Kidel’s second film in the double bill, the rarely seen Tricky Live, a unique record of Tricky at full throttle, featuring vocalists Martina Topley-Bird and Cath Coffey (Stereo MCs), filmed in near total darkness at the Shepherds Bush Empire in 1997.